S3fs performance improvements or alternative?
Solution 1:
S3FS may not be the best choice for a large amount of smaller files. The overhead with S3FS is pretty high as well. I'd suggest using something like S3Curl
You can even get parallel transfers going. Just remember it will never be fast like EBS / local storage.
If you need to have it as a 'mountable' storage, the only alternatives to S3FS that I know of is S3Backer or s3ql
Solution 2:
I just benchmarked riofs compared to s3fs. My test case was a relatively simple bash script that ran pngquant on each .png it found. On a testbucket with ~70 images of which ~20 where png (spread over a lot of subdirectories, which prob slows things down) the results where:
s3fs: 3m54
riofs: 15.9s
So for this testcase riofs is ~15x faster! Setup was also very straightforward, although the docs are somewhat terse.
Regarding the fact that the script still took 15.9s: it's not very efficient, also actually running pngquant on png's is a cpu intensive process.
Solution 3:
I just released v0.0.1 of https://github.com/kahing/goofys which was partly motivated by performance problems in s3fs. File creation speedup is 3-6x and time to first byte is 58x. Feedback welcome!
Solution 4:
Just adding riofs to the mix. I could not see any benchmark for now but there is an issue/request that anybody can do.